Introduction

It's hard to believe, but the year is almost over. So much has transpired in the world of PCs within the past year. Quad core is pretty much mainstream now and manufacturers are continuing to release more and more cores. DX11 is taking off and changing a ton of the gaming world. 3D gaming and movies are making their push to the market. Standard definition is all but dead, save the old holdouts. GPUs are giving the CPU market a break for general and multimedia computing. I could go on, but the year isn't over yet. There is still more to come by Christmas.

One technology that has made it's mark in 2010 is USB 3.0. With mindblowing theoretical speeds, it has delivered as anticipated, making external storage much more bearable. Companies have flooded the market with faster and more efficient docks, enclosures, and flash drives. Now the flash memory market just needs to keep going down in price so consumers can afford high speed drives. The USB 3.0 raid drives have been shown to break the 300 MB/s barrier. That's faster then my regular internal hard drive that I use now.

The Thermaltake BlacX 5G is an upgrade in the BlacX line of HDD docking stations. The BlacX 5G boasts more speed and up to date support. The 5G tag is for the USB 3.0 and SATA III internal makeover. SATA III has a 6Gb/s theoretical speed, while USB 3.0 has 5Gb/s. So, with this BlacX upgrade, you should be able to get the most out of your external HDD dock.